Leonard Cassuto (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: “The Coy Reaper: Unmasque-ing the Red Death,” Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 317-20.
[In the following excerpt, Cassuto suggests that Death himself is the narrator in Poe's “The Masque of the Red Death” and explores the thematic implications of this discovery.]
Much has been written about Poe's narrators, and with good reason. Nearly always unnamed—and therefore seen as somehow unreliable—they also have disturbing tendencies that range from the unstable and...
Source: Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, ©2001 Gale Cengage. All Rights Reserved. Full copyright.
(The entire page is 1615 words.)
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